China forces one of its Muslim minorities to install spyware on their phones
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Re: China forces one of its Muslim minorities to install spyware on their phones
#2Disgusting
Re: China forces one of its Muslim minorities to install spyware on their phones
#3This is exactly what trump has planned for America, if anyone deserves this it's the Christian extremists trying to stop abortions.
You will all just sit back in comfort while hate and bigotry eat up the world.
Re: China forces one of its Muslim minorities to install spyware on their phones
#4Disgusting
Not to mention embarassingly ineffective.
Re: China forces one of its Muslim minorities to install spyware on their phones
#5>The app reportedly scans for the MD5 digital signatures of media files in the phone, and matches them to a stored database of offending files classified by the government as illegal "terrorist-related" media.
What a dumb way to scan for "illegal" content, considering the goverment already controls their portion of the internet. So instead of monitoring who is accessing what they decide to compare checksums of files which can be trivially changed which would result in a completely new hash value.
Seems like a very incompetent way of doing this.
Re: China forces one of its Muslim minorities to install spyware on their phones
#6This is interesting. It goes to show how an autoritarian government can fix some problems in a more effective way. You can remove terrorist propaganda from YouTube, but how do you stop the spread of those videos in private platforms or messaging applications?
And even if the first version of this spying app only checks for md5 sums, which is arguably useless, I'm sure they're working on something more effective.
Re: China forces one of its Muslim minorities to install spyware on their phones
#7Is this OS specific? It would be good to have more details on the mechanism this app is using. Presumably this can only scan media that is stored outside of apps?
Re: China forces one of its Muslim minorities to install spyware on their phones
#8I can think of so many countermeasures.
- Append a null byte to the end of your files, giving them a unique hash value.
- Disallow internet access to the application.
- Spoof the server using DNS tricks and control what is sent and received.
- Reverse engineer the application to make it look as if it's working while it actually isn't.
- Sandbox the application.
- Use an alternative phone for all of your "sensitive" activities.
- Don't keep "sensitive" information on phones, rather store on an encrypted computer.
- Use an old burner phone.
So not only is the policy utterly disgusting, it's also completely ineffective. A small blessing perhaps.
Re: China forces one of its Muslim minorities to install spyware on their phones
#9I suppose it would be easy to carry a secondary, hidden device and only use your primary device for inconspicuous activities?
Re: China forces one of its Muslim minorities to install spyware on their phones
#10Wow, those chinese surely are totalitarian in the way they approach surveillance technology aren't they ?
Good thing we have nothing like that. Only just closed hardware with closed or with some parts open complicated software mostly made by a few corporations which tend to and have in fact in past coopoerated with governments without even thinking about their customers.